NOVEMBER 275 



heartlessness to the fate of individual lives, for it must 

 be but a small percentage of elvers that escapes the 

 voracity of birds and fishes at this tender stage. Man 

 the omnivorous, of course, deigns to reckon elvers among 

 his delicacies. Couch was told by a Cornish fisherman 

 that he had seen at Exeter four carts loaded with these 

 creatures, about twelve to the ounce. They are fried 

 in lumps called elver - cakes, which Montague the 

 ichthyologist described as peculiar in appearance from 

 the number of little black eyes bespangling them. 



Well, the Leptocephalua blunder has been wiped oft' 

 the slate, yet we are far from mastery of the whole eel 

 mystery. The elvers push up to the remotest inland 

 waters — to Highland lochs and village duckponds, 

 through the noblest river as well as the wayside ditch — 

 but nobody knows how long they remain there before 

 returning to the sea to spawn. Neither has it been 

 observed that, once having so returned to the sea, they 

 ever revisit fresh water. It is believed that eels remain 

 in fresh water for an indefinite number of seasons, till 

 the sexual and generative impulse makes itself felt and 

 sends them seawards. There the organs of reproduction 

 are developed with great rapidity and to such a degree 

 that both sexes die from exhaustion after the act of 

 reproduction. Nature is indifferent to their fate, for 

 her law — increase and multiply — has been amply fulfilled. 

 The ovary of a female eel thirty-two inches long has been 

 estimated to contain no fewer than ten milUon seven 

 hundred thousand eggs ! 



The fact that eels have continued to abound in the 

 Thames during the sixty and odd years when it was 

 hermetically closed by pollution against the ascent of 



